Is Contextual Advertising In Your SEM Strategy?

Talking to many companies who are doing their search engine marketing in-house, I’ve noticed they are solely focused on paid search in the search engines. Sure, billions of people worldwide search the engines daily, but those people are being led to websites which many of them use content networks to monetize their sites which display relevant ads to their websites content.

Let’s take the Google content network for example. Thousands of sites, if not millions, use Google Adsense to monetize their content. That content in itself is very valuable to you as a marketer because it engages the user to your particular niche.

The Google content network alone has billions of impressions daily. My mentality as an online marketer is always this: If your competition is there, you should be there also. Of course, it always comes down to ROI but you can establish some good branding via content networks and are likely to pay less per click than paid search in the search engines.

The Google content network gives you many options as a marketer that lets you target your ad to some very specifics:

Geo-targeting: Advertise to users searching for information in a specific city, state, country, territory, or region.

If you’re a newbie and aren’t sure what contextual advertising is, here is a screen shot of where your ad would be displayed using the Google Content Network (related to the keywords and sites which you choose to target and bid on):

My two favorite contextual networks are Quigo and Kontera. What are yours?